Nicholas Dolan’s little finger arrives in the morning post two days after Just Albert had asked Father O’Dea to get word to O’Hanley, and now it sits on the cherrywood table, tucked in its bedding of newspaper in the small box in which it had come. Ginny Dolan wipes away the tears that only Albert has been allowed to see.
‘It’s all go, Mrs Dolan. I’ve been told to expect instructions on where to hand over the money in exchange for Nicky. Don’t be worrying. They want their bundle back more than they want to hurt Nicholas. He’ll be grand.’
Just Albert stands over the table, unable to take his eyes from the severed little finger. It is most definitely Nicky’s. There is no doubt about this in his mind. He is surprised by this instant recognition, and has an urge to examine his own hands, his own fingers. Would anybody recognise his, he wonders, the way both he and Mrs Dolan had instantly known that the finger in the box—though the flesh is waxy and a nub of bone extrudes from under the furl of neatly sliced skin just below the knuckle—belonged to their beloved Nicholas?
‘These men …’ Ginny begins, and tears again well up in her eyes. ‘He was fighting for these men? He trusted these men, and they’re willing to trade him for money and … take off his finger like a pork rib on a plate.’ Her voice chokes with a sob and she clears her throat. ‘You’ll take care of everything, Albert, won’t you?’
‘Of course I will, Mrs Dolan.’
She is silent for a long moment, staring up at the man she has known since she raised him up from the grit and grime of the street where she had found him. ‘You’re a good boy, Albert. You’ve always been so good to me …’
‘Not half as good as you deserve, Mrs Dolan.’
She smiles warmly at him. ‘And when you’re finished, when you’ve Nicky back, the men, who did this …’
‘I’ll tend to it, Mrs Dolan, you know that.’
O’Keefe’s door opens no more than six inches, and an unfamiliar face peers out, causing Just Albert to question for a moment whether he has somehow knocked on the wrong door.
‘Mr O’Keefe. Is he in?’
Wary eyes weigh him. Bloodshot and only recently wakened in a pale, sickly face. Hard eyes, but eyes that have seen a thing or two and aren’t afraid of Just Albert, who fingers the chequered grip of the Colt in the deep pocket of his trenchcoat. He will shoot through the pocket, if needs must, and the man who has answered the door appears to sense this.
‘No, mate, ’e’s out. Who’s calling?’
‘Where is he? This is the third time I’ve called these past two days. He’s not in there having a kip? Sleeping off a skite, is he?’
The pale-faced man opens the door wide with one hand, exposing to Albert that he is dressed only in a long nightshirt. ‘Take a butcher’s for yourself if you like, my friend, but ’e ain’t ’ere.’ The offer comes as more of a threat than a kindness.
Just Albert does not step into the room, but makes a show of peering past the man into the basement flat. There is something familiar about the man but he cannot place it. ‘You can put away that shooter you’re holding behind your back now.’
The man at the door smiles with his mouth but not his eyes. ‘And you can stow the one you’re fingering in your Lucy, there, chum.’
‘London boy, wha’?’
‘Shoreditch born and bred. I didn’t get your name, mate. So’s I can tell the Sergeant you’ve been ’ere.’
‘A friend of Mr O’Keefe’s, are you?’
‘Who wants to know, then?’
‘Albert is who.’
‘Albert …?’
‘Just Albert’s grand.’
‘Look, mate, I’ve been laid up these past three, four days. He’s been back—the lady of the ’ouse has told me that much, but I don’t know when or for how long. You’re no old bill, I can see that, so who are you?’
‘Mr O’Keefe is doing a job for my boss, he is, and I need to find him. The job’s not done.’
Finch appears to consider this. ‘Why don’t you step inside and I’ll make us a brew. But I can tell you right now, mate, Sergeant O’Keefe will be doing no work for no man for a while, says the Jew sawbones we had in to see him.’
The man in the nightshirt steps aside and allows Just Albert into the flat. He sets the Webley revolver he has been holding behind his back on the desk beside the bed.
Just Albert looks down at the sleeping O’Keefe, his face a swollen mass of blue and dark grey bruising.
Finch joins Just Albert at the bedside. ‘A taxi brought him yesterday. And ’e could barely make it down the steps, barely standing when I opened the door. You any notion who done him like this?’
Just Albert nods. ‘A fair notion.’ He turns to look at Finch, studying him for the first time. ‘You don’t look well yourself, Mr …’
‘Finch, Jack Finch. And don’t you fret about me. Fighting fit I am.’
Albert smiles. ‘So you say.’
‘So I am. Right, you sit down there and I’ll put the billy on the ring for tea. Then you can tell me who done the sergeant like this. Right?’
‘He’ll live then, Mr O’Keefe?’
‘Should, the doc says. Nothing broke up too bad on the inside,’ Finch says.
Just Albert studies O’Keefe for a long moment then turns to Finch. ‘And how do you know Mr O’Keefe, if you don’t mind my asking?’
‘Don’t mind at all. We was coppers together, down in Cork,’ Finch says, with some small pride in the words.
‘You were a copper?’
Finch smiles at this. ‘Of a sorts.’
‘A Black and Tan?’
‘Right you are, my china.’
‘And that makes you a veteran soldier from the war?’
‘Four years of mud and blood.’
Just Albert studies him for another long moment, and Finch says, ‘You’d want to paint a picture or ask me to dance, Albert my friend, or fuck off with the eyeballs.’
‘You’ve been in the shop. That’s where I know you from. With the other English lads. Flashing it, spreading the coin round.’
‘What shop you on about, mate?’ Finch’s eyes darken and go to the Webley on the desk and back to Albert.
‘Ginny Dolan’s gaff, in Monto.’
‘Ginny what’s gaff?’
‘Dolan’s. Corner of Foley Street. The sweetshop, pal. The knocking-shop.’
Finch appears to think this over and then relaxes. ‘Look, if there’s a knocking-shop in the ’ole of the country I ain’t been in, you’ll ’ave to show me it some time, so I’ll take your word for it. But you’d want to keep buttoned up about where you know a man from and who ’is mates are, all right?’
‘Schtum is me second name.’
‘I don’t give a fuck what you call yourself. But you can be right sure they’ll be no more splashing the silver about for old Finchy. Stony broke as the day after demob, I am.’
Again, Just Albert studies Finch. ‘You fit enough for a bit of a stunt, then, Jack Finch? There’s a few quid in it for you and a chance to give your mate, Mr O’Keefe here, a hand in his time of need.’
‘Fit as a corn-fed pigeon, me, mate. And I could use the bees and honey.’ Finch smiles.
‘I’ll take that cup of tea, Mr Finch,’ Just Albert says, taking out his box of short cigars and offering one to the Londoner, ‘and we’ll sort something out between us.’
49
Five days pass before word comes from O’Hanley.
Just Albert spends the morning sparring in the John of God’s Boxing Club, waiting for Finch to come with what he has asked him to bring. He stands naked, drying himself with a thick Egyptian cotton towel that no one in the gym would be foolish enough to touch when Ginny enters the club, crossing over to the sink, amidst the racket of gloves on pads, the leathery syncopation of galloping speed bags, the nicking whir of skip
ping-ropes. The noise dies, the sparring in the raised ring slows to a halt, when the training men and boys see her. No women have been known to enter the club, and at first this is why they stop, but then Ginny Dolan is no ordinary woman. She is well known and both man and boy alike tip fingers to forelocks as she passes.
‘Are you ready, Albert?’
Just Albert clutches the towel to cover his nakedness. ‘Jaysus, Mrs Dolan, the state of me.’
Ginny smiles. ‘Nothing I haven’t seen before, pet. I wiped that arse of yours when you were only a whip, don’t you forget.’
Just Albert smiles back and ties the towel around his waist. He looks past her, and his look is enough to send eyes to the floor, men and boys back to the labour of training. The sounds of the boxing gym slap and patter back to life.
‘I’m ready. Once the fella comes.’
‘Mr O’Keefe’s friend?’
‘He seems sound enough. And he’s been in a scrap or two. He’d an arsenal the IRA’d be proud of stashed in a shed behind an auld doll’s lodgings in Harold’s Cross.’
‘And how is poor Mr O’Keefe?’
‘Poor nothing. If he done what he should’ve done to one or two of the fellas we met along the way, he’d be in no state like he’s in now. He done his part, I’ll hand him that, but too soft by half, our lad O’Keefe.’
‘Not at all like his father, then.’
Just Albert contemplates this as he dresses, climbing into his smalls under the towel, his socks and trousers and shining brown brogues. He remembers how O’Keefe had looked this morning when he had called for Finch at the Cunningham flat to nail down the final details with the Shoreditch man; how O’Keefe had insisted he be included in the exchange. The doorman recalls how he had told O’Keefe that he would be more hindrance than help but had taken no pleasure in saying it.
‘Maybe more like his auldfella than you’d reckon,’ Just Albert says, buttoning his shirt and tucking it, sweet and neat, into his trousers, hoisting his braces up over his shoulders. ‘He can soak a beating like the father.’
‘The mark of a man,’ Ginny says, Just Albert left wondering whether she means this or is being sarcastic. ‘When will you go?’
As if she has summoned it with her words, the door to the club opens, and this time it is Finch, carrying the leather bag that had held the money when Just Albert grabbed it at the hotel. Some of the boxers look up but quickly resume their training.
‘’Allo, love,’ Finch says to Ginny, doffing his trilby. ‘Fine morning for it.’
Ginny does not smile. ‘It will be if you get my Nicky back.’
‘All things going well, missus, and we’ll ’ave ’im back by tea, ain’t I right, Mr Albert?’
The doorman ignores Finch, inwardly wincing at his bravado, willing his demeanour to match the gravity of their mission. In this he is without success.
‘And sort out the men who’ve been holding him,’ she says.
Finch, still smiling, says, ‘All things going well, missus, all things going well.’ Turning to Albert, he says, ‘Bootlace worked a charm, if I do say so myself.’
Albert shoots him a hard look. ‘Not in front of Mrs Dolan, Finch.’
Finch touches his hat brim. ‘What was I thinking? Apologies, right, love?’
‘Just get my Nicky back,’ Ginny Dolan says, and Finch’s smile fades, a chill blanching his back.
50
Finch and Albert are about to board the number thirty-one tram to Howth at Nelson’s Pillar—as they have been instructed by the message from O’Hanley delivered by morning’s post—when they see O’Keefe, limping towards them in the remarkable Indian summer sunshine.
‘What are you at, then?’ Finch says. ‘You’re in no nick for a jaunt you aren’t, my son. ’Ow did you even know to find us?’
‘Never assume a man is sleeping when he’s only got his eyes closed, Finch.’
‘He’s right, Mr O’Keefe,’ Just Albert says, ‘you’re no good
to us.’
‘I’m grand, Finch, Albert. Nearly a week in bed is enough for any man…’ But there is pain in his eyes at the effort it takes him to say this. ‘I’ll be grand.’ He stands next to them, and indicates for them to board the tram. ‘After ye, lads.’ He attempts a smile, and a woman with cloth shopping bags who has been waiting steps back and appears to decide on a later tram.
Finch smiles at O’Keefe.
‘Fack off, chum. Age before beauty.’
O’Keefe attempts another smile, and the pain of it is so intense that stars erupt in his vision. He drowns the pain with a naggin of whiskey he takes from inside his suit jacket.
Just Albert takes O’Keefe by the arm and guides him up onto the back conductor’s platform. ‘We can’t miss this tram, boys, so stop the messing and shift it.’
The tram pulls off with a lurching roll, and O’Keefe has to cling to the overhead railing to keep himself from tumbling off the open platform and out into the street.
‘You sit down there, Mr O’Keefe,’ Just Albert says, and for once, without argument, O’Keefe obeys him. There are only four other passengers on this lower deck of the tram, and Finch climbs the spiral stairs to the upper deck to check the number of passengers there.
‘Just two old girls with a picnic lunch and the conductor,’ he says when he returns. O’Keefe notices that he speaks only to Just Albert, as if his presence has been noted and forgotten.
‘I’m not armed,’ O’Keefe says, taking the whiskey again from his coat as the conductor comes down the spiral stairs from the upper deck of the tram. The conductor takes a long look at O’Keefe, before turning to Finch and Albert.
‘Tickets please, gentlemen,’ he says, but without the usual jaunty authority in his voice. There is something about these men that makes him wary; a look in their eyes, their steady attention to the street outside the tram, the heavy trenchcoats in the rare weather.
‘Three,’ Just Albert says, ‘for Howth.’
‘Plenty of seats to choose from…’ the conductor says, as if to break the silence, taking the proffered coins from Just Albert and tearing three tickets from the roll hanging from the dispenser on his belt.
‘We’ll stand,’ Just Albert says, turning away from the conductor and facing out into the street. Finch joins him there, hanging from a hand bar on the platform, scanning the streets around them as they roll eastward, the tram running more smoothly now as they pick up speed down Summerhill approaching Ballybough.
The conductor has moved to the front of the tram to stand by the driver, and Finch says, over his shoulder to O’Keefe, ‘You all right, there, Sarn’t?’
‘I am,’ O’Keefe says. He stows the bottle back in his coat and heaves himself to standing. He takes his place behind the men, hanging from a strap. ‘What are we looking for then?’
‘For Nicky,’ Just Albert says, still scanning the footpaths as the tram makes its way through Fairview and Marino, through Clontarf and onto the coast road, the water at their backs, on the opposite side of the tram to where they stand on the open platform.
‘All Albert ’ere was told is be on this tram and ’ave the bag of money with us,’ Finch explains.
O’Keefe thinks about this for a long moment. There would be few passengers boarding this tram at half-three on a Wednesday afternoon. Howth is a small fishing village, popular at weekends with daytrippers eager to climb the hill above the harbour and overlook Dublin bay, but on weekdays, the trams are infrequent and lightly travelled. There are long stretches of empty coastline between Dublin and Howth as well, which would allow O’Hanley to control the conditions of any exchange. Various scenarios run through his mind, but he has trouble following any one idea to its conclusion. The morphine has made his thinking hazy, as has the whiskey he has been drinking since he boarded the tram in Rathmines in pursuit of Finch and Albert.
‘There’r
e no other instructions?’
‘None.’
‘What happens when we get to Howth? If we get to Howth and we haven’t been contacted?’
‘Don’t know, Mr O’Keefe … now will you shut your gob, to fuck, and stop asking questions I can’t answer?’ Just Albert says, still scanning the road beside the tram tracks, now and again leaning out of the tram to search fore and aft.
Shortly, the tram clatters to a halt in front of Doherty’s Coast Bar, and two passengers disembark, leaving only the two upstairs and an older man and what appears to be his grandson sitting behind the driver.
‘We should get those people off … the passengers,’ O’Keefe says.
‘Get them off then,’ Just Albert says.
O’Keefe considers doing just this, but dreads the pain inherent in the effort and drinks more whiskey instead. He watches through the window as a Wright’s fish van passes them on its way into Dublin. The tram lurches forward, tilting drunkenly as it gains speed, and O’Keefe feels nauseous with the movement. He closes his eyes in a vain attempt to damp down the illness, and as quickly opens them. His complexion is deathly white but for the fading mottle of bruising around his eyes and neck.
‘You shouldn’t be here, Mr O’Keefe. You’ll do yourself harm.’
His words are spoken with some small compassion, but O’Keefe is deaf to this.
‘I’ll be grand, I will.’
‘Albert, mate, ’ere we go, ’ere we are, chum,’ Finch says.
Just Albert turns back to the open platform to see a Ford Tourer keeping pace with the tram. They are on a long, straight stretch of more than two miles before the tram reaches Sutton and must slow, and the Ford and tram are making a steady twenty miles per hour in the summer heat, side by side. The roof of the Tourer is slightly lower than the height of the three men on the conductor’s platform, and Just Albert crouches down to look into the car. As he does, the Ford’s driver—a young lad with a bandaged hand and a Thompson machine-gun resting across his forearm, barrel jutting from the window—waves and winks. It takes Just Albert a second to recognise the driver as the lad they had shot at in Murphy’s rooms in Burton’s Hotel. He is about to dive back into the tram, thinking that the driver will fire on them, when Nicholas appears in the seat behind the driver.
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